After many years of development, support, and running Bluecherry as a small business, the time has come to close the commercial side of the project. This was not an easy decision, but it’s one I feel is best for ensuring that Bluecherry continues in a way that is sustainable and accessible to everyone.
What’s changing:
Bluecherry is no longer offered as a paid product (donations are accepted!)
All features are now free and open source under the GPL license.
There will be no more licensing fees, no purchase requirements, and no restrictions on camera counts.
What’s staying the same:
The software itself lives on through the community and improvements as time allows.
Clients for Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain available from our downloads page and client releases.
Our community is still active — join us on the forums or in Discord.
Bluecherry will now be sustained entirely through community involvement and voluntary donations. If you’ve found Bluecherry valuable and want to help cover hosting costs and future development, you can support the project by donating. Donations are never required — the software is and will remain free — but every bit helps keep the project alive.
Depends alot on the interest and support (for donations, etc). Existing support contracts will still be a priority, but newer features will be more on case by case (supported) basis.
That’s well understood, and obviously as this is an open source project now we should expect what we can get.
For those of us that were willing to spend a reasonable amount of money on this project, it’s difficult for any small company to financially support any specific features or updates/bug fixes, as it would be far too expensive. It’s ideal if the whole customer base can pay in common for further development.
The only alternative would be some sort of Kickstarter situation where multiple companies and individuals can contribute so that the load is shared, otherwise, we’re at the mercy of either the good graces of existing developers to work on it as they have time and feel like it, or some sort of angel investor / customer that has a lot of money to throw at it.
I feel like there is definitely a hidden niche market for Linux based NVR with a cost that is not like MilestoneXProtect (windows based), which for about 50-ish cameras costs about $1,500 per year, not including a base license of about $10,000, and something very cheap like BlueIris (also windows based and capped at 64 cameras) which costs $80 per year.
I really wish it was possible to pay under $500/yr for something solid that is also Linux based.
Sorry to see the commercial side is closing down. It’s always hard to see a small business struggle, we need more of them and fewer mega corps. I hope your other business effort succeed. Thanks for keeping Bluecherry DVR alive in the GPL world. I have tried 3 or 4 low cost or GPL linux based camera recording and monitoring products, and this had most of the capabilities I was looking for.
I’m a home user, did purchase a perpetual license. Home use is hard to manage all the services converting to subscription.
Donate links: